Sharing restaurants, events, recipes, & musings from Connecticut, where summer is a verb & happy hour is a state of mind.

Friday, March 14, 2008

I have found you can find happiness in slavery

New thought process that occurred in the shower this morning, because I was thinking about how uber-functional I've been lately. The government wants us all to be functional, hard working, over working producers. We should sleep less, work more, etc. etc. But in the past decades the rate of depression has been going up at a troubling rate. Depressed people are not good "society machines". In order to motivate us all to keep on working instead of moping about, there is a noticeable influx of shows that encourage us to be shallow and money seeking. Haven't you noticed? There are way fewer sitcoms about quirky dysfunctional people than there used to be. Now shows still concede that most people are pretty messed up, but they're messed up in shallow, money seeking, non-philosophical ways. Examples: Dirty Sexy Money, Cashmere Mafia, Lipstick Jungle, Gossip Girl. These shows also emphasize women as bitchy and manipulative, and I think this is an attempt to channel depression into a more productive method. So I wonder: are anti-depressants becoming a sort of "study drug" for life? Nowadays, people need an extra boost just to function, let alone excel. This all seemed beautifully connected in the shower and I told myself to go write it immediately, but I studied a bit first, so this line of reasoning became a little bit blurry. Lastly, I must mention again how FANTASTIC Nine Inch Nails is. I want to post all the lyrics, all the time. I want them tattooed all over me (not seriously). That's how good they are.